Life of Pi showing in Taiwan until Jul. 27

Life of Pi showing in Taiwan until Jul. 27

2025-07-18

The award-winning stage adaptation of Life of Pi has dazzled audiences around the world. It is now showing in Taiwan, featuring stunning puppetry and immersive visuals. FTV reporter Stephany Yang spoke with the cast and crew to learn more about the production.

The award-winning stage adaptation of Life of Pi has made a stop in Taiwan, featuring intricate puppetry and stunning visuals. Kashif Ghole and Sonya Venugopal will take turns playing the role of Pi. Traditionally portrayed by male actors, Pi is reimagined by Sonya Venugopal as a female character, adding a new layer of emotional depth to the role.

Sonya Venugopal
Actor
One of the beautiful things that our writer Lolita did was create a show and write a script that any gender can play any role. That is something I haven’t really experienced in any other productions I have done in my life and in my career. I think there was a lot. You are a bit hesitant at first but the beautiful thing is this story is about the story. It is about survival. It is about love. It is about perseverance and that can be portrayed by any gender in any role.

Kashif Ghole
Actor
In terms of preparing, I kind of just wanted to learn a little more about puppeteering, and we got that opportunity to learn about it. We even attempted to even a fragment of the work that the lovely puppeteers do in one of the weeks in our rehearsal period.

Gabriella Bird
Touring director
Yann Martel’s fantastic novel was adapted for film by, of course, Ang Lee using all sorts of brilliant techniques like CGI and the ability to jump cut between scenes. We of course, don’t have that in the theater, but what we do have is live people in front of us and storytelling that is present and calling back to a storytelling tradition that goes back to centuries and centuries of just people sitting in front of you and delivering a story in a really simple way using bodies and words. We got some incredible technical advancements which help us jump between Pondicherry Zoo, the market, and then jump us in seconds to the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

This theatrical version, adapted by Lolita Chakrabarti brings Yann Martel’s novel to life using giant animal puppets and integrates immersive visual effects and stage effects. At the press conference, puppeteer director Tom Stacy shares the key elements in making puppets come alive on stage and the difficulties.

Tom Stacy
Puppeteer director
It is about not only the physicality which is very hard, but about creating the character. We have three people on the tiger but we actually have eight puppeteers all in all, who all share the role. We actually got many puppets on the show. We have an orangutan, we have a zebra, we have a hyena, a giraffe, and meerkats. They have to embody all these characters each time, sometimes very quickly. So to do that, it takes a lot of training and effort for them to have one mind and one character and I think that is also the beauty of seeing something come alive truthfully on stage.

Liu Yi-ruu
NTCH general and artistic director
We’ve probably been discussing about bringing Life of Pi to perform here for several years. During the pandemic, we kept talking about whether it would be possible to bring it to Taiwan. We were so drawn to this production, and we worked so hard to bring it here. It’s not only about having great actors, it is also about the theatrical magic and how immersive the production is. It easily draws the audience into the story.

The production will be staged until Jul. 27 at the National Theater and Concert Hall, featuring a total of 13 performances.

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